


The Low Rumble of Distant Thunder

by ienablu



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Non-Linear Narrative, Rarewomen Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-01
Updated: 2013-05-01
Packaged: 2017-12-10 02:05:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/780513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ienablu/pseuds/ienablu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jackie waits for Rose. Idris is waiting for someone or has someone waiting for her or will. Tenses are tricky, and so are the timelines.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Low Rumble of Distant Thunder

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ollipop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ollipop/gifts).



> I only learned about the exchange just recently, decided to peruse some letters, and my browser placed "...anyplace you can cause Idris to appear" just above "Jackie Tyler waiting for Rose." I knew I had to write it, enjoyed doing so, and hope you enjoy reading it!

The date is May 23rd, 2005, and Jackie Tyler is in Chiswick, a stack of papers in one arm, a staple gun in the other.

Idris is at the street corner that Jackie is approaching. Jackie looks at her strangely, as she always does, and holds a flier up to staple.

“Have you seen Rose?” the flier asks.

Has Idris seen Rose? Of course she’s seen Rose. And Rose has seen her too. It’s rather interesting, and Idris wonders if Rose would recognize her in this form, in a way her thief did not.

She really should avoid Rose, the next time they meet.

Only, there will be a next time they meet, and meeting implies that Idris doesn’t avoid her, and that seems far more fun than the alternative. If Idris had wanted to avoid meeting people, she would have kept her doors locked, all those many years ago.

“She’s in 5.5-slash-apple-slash-twenty-six,” Idris announces, as Jackie staples the paper to the pole. It will stay up there for nine days, before it's replaced by an inquiry for a missing cat. It's an imperfect estimate, because at the moment Rose is also in 1869 Cardiff, and 1953 London, and 2012 London, and she's also returned from her second sojourn to Dårlig Ulv-Stranden, and she could be with any given regeneration of her thief, and the cat will be found at eleven at night, but for corporeality it's a close enough approximation. 

Jackie turns around to look at her, then. “What?” she asks, frowning. Then, quiet, and full of hope, she asks, “Have you seen my daughter?”

Idris has, and Idris is the reason why Jackie has not. She sees the look of growing hope, and sees the bright aura of hope as well. Idris feels a dull, heavy feeling at that. There are still ten months, before she can bring Rose and her thief back.

She timed it out perfectly -- there’s not just Rose, but Lance Bennett and Donna Noble’s wedding, and the Sontarans and Martha Jones, and hundreds of other dominoes waiting to be tipped, that could not be tipped properly without first advancing Rose’s timeline twelve months. Her thief had known to advance it, it’s why he went twelve hours instead of twelve minutes, but if she knows anything about his thief it’s that he really doesn’t know what he’s doing, and sometimes-usually-always needs help.

“You’re going to blame him, but you shouldn’t. It’s my...” _fault_ is the word that humans seem to enjoy tossing around, and the word her thief seems especially attracted to. 

“What are you talking about?” Jackie asks. “Are you just talking rubbish?”

“Your daughter is out there, lost, and I’m just talking rubbish,” Idris says. She frowns, though, a moment later. That was supposed to be Jackie’s line. She really needs to keep track of conversations better, but it’s so difficult, and this body continues to make it more so.

Jackie’s glow of hope is all but gone, replaced by a hot flare of anger. Anger is easier for Jackie, it has been since she lost her first Tyler. But even now, two months wondering where her daughter’s gone, why she hasn’t phoned, if she’s safe, if she’s even _alive_ , the anger isn’t enough. She just glares at Idris, then squares her shoulders, and moves on.

Idris is sorry for her loss.

She is glad for her future find.

She thrills at the current memory of Rose’s excitement when she sees the gown she will meet Dickens in.

It’s complicated.

And her thief will complicate it further, but eventually will make sense of it, and Idris thinks she is looking forward to that. She wants to stay here, she’ll be found more easily here, and she thinks she would like to be found, but right now, there’s a tug in her heart, and _here_ is not where she’s needed.

She takes a deep breath, adjusts the bows on the front of her dress, and goes.

\- -- -

She lands in the Powell Estate, June 7th, 2006, at 2:16:04 in the afternoon.

Jackie Tyler is heading to the building, two plastic bags in each hand.

“Hello, could I have a cuppa?” Idris asks. She knows it sounds out of the blue to Jackie, but Idris actually meant it at this exact moment in time.

Jackie squints at her. “I’ve seen you before, somewhere, haven’t I?”

“Yes!” Idris says. “Many times before. You weren’t as happy to see me then, but next time, you will.”

Jackie stares at her. “Can you give me a hand?” she asks, finally, lifting her bags up.

“I can give you two.” Three, even, possibly, but then there would be the possibility of Jack retrieving it, and that would be very bad.

Jackie unloads her bags onto Idris, and then continues up the stairs.

All of time and space, and Idris finds herself fascinated by the Tyler’s flat. She’s been in once before, just recently, in Jackie’s timeline, but she never really got a good look around.

“Oi,” Jackie says, and Idris turns to her. Jackie is standing in the doorway to the kitchen. “I’ve got the kettle on, if you wouldn’t mind bringing those in here so I can start putting them away.”

Idris remembers she is carrying four plastic bags. The weight barely registers, she’s accustomed to so much more, but now that she’s thinking about it, she can feel the sloshing of milk in its carton, the crumple of a package of biscuits, and she’s careful to mind the dozen eggs and sixty-three red grapes as she sets down the bags on the counter.

“How did you lift all that so easily?” Jackie asks. She starts muttering, mostly to herself, about how heavy groceries are, you’d think someone would have invented a way to carry all that weight more easily, and all the trinkets Rose brings her, why hasn’t she brought her that?

The beezolium weather forecast is on the corner bookshelf, in front of a stack of CDs, next to a picture of Rose. Most of the pictures of Rose are on the mantle of the fireplace. Her at age seven, a beaded necklace from another asteroid bazaar, her at age eighteen, her at age sixteen, the clock she remembers from Jackie's mum's room, a decorative whicker ball, a picture of Rose when she was four.

There’s a soft drink stain just under the coffee table, a lingering reminder of a sleepover Rose had when she was ten. The coffee table itself has the slightest dent in it, from Mickey banging it when he was vacuuming for them, once. The coffee table was bought by Pete, and the armchair is more recent, bought from a friend of a friend at a discount, that Jackie dozes on every couple of nights when she stays up late watching the telly, lulled to sleep by the background noise. She chose the new furniture, Rose chose the new color for the walls, and even now Idris can hear teenaged Mickey saying the color is girly, and Jackie telling him to keep his feet off the coffee table. The purple pillows were a birthday present from Mickey, that she moved out of the room because they clash horribly, and moved back in a week ago.

There’s a forgotten orange under the sofa, from Howard’s courtship.

This flat is full of memories and beauty and fossils and faith and pain and life, and Idris wants to stay here. She knows she can’t -- there are dominoes that need to be tipped, a mention of Rose needs to be made, and a washing machine fuse needs to be blown on her way out, and it’s against her nature besides -- but she can stay for one cuppa, and she tells Jackie that the lone choice of English Black is fine with her.

The phone rings, in the background, nine notes below the sharp whistle of the kettle. Jackie answers the phone, and a beat later, answers the kettle as well. "Oh, hey Bev," she greets. "Sorry I can't really chat right now, love, I've got a guest over."

If she could, Jackie would have both Idris and Bev over for tea. She secretly hopes for it, she can't bear the flat silent, Idris thinks, and a moment later hears Jackie say, "You should come over, I'll introduce you." The flat is far more full of memories than it is of life, with Mickey gone, and Rose only stopping by on a whim. Jackie doesn't get many visitors, talks plenty on the phone and talks plenty down at the pub, but she doesn't have anyone to talk _to_. Pete's gone, Mickey's gone, Rose is still alive and she's happy and mostly-safe with the Doctor, but sometimes Jackie feels like her daughter, her daughter who would come to her about anything and everything, her daughter who she could coddle and comfort and understand is gone, or that she is gone from her daughter's life.

She understands the pain Jackie is going through. She, too, has watched Rose leave her and wished she wouldn’t. She’s also had to stand back and watch as others left, some willingly, some completely unwilling. They are strays, in the end none of them were meant to stay forever, but Idris has loved, does love, and will love them all.

And at the same time they are leaving her, at this very moment, they are all marveling at her for the first time.

It’s very strange, and big and complicated and happy and sad, and she imagines it must be much more so for those who have to live in linearly, but it is not difficult. There’s nothing difficult about the warm blossom of affection she feels as Jackie hands her a steaming cup of tea, as a flask is spilled and drips down her grates.

She takes a sip, and it’s fantastic.

\- -- -

Idris inhales deeply, then whirrs an exhale.

She feels sore in a way she hasn’t been since a year that paradoxically did and did not happen. She feels more sore thinking about it, just as she had felt sore when her thief had gotten mail and she had felt his faint hum of hope, that it might be _him_. She feels sore, though the body is imperfect towards the balancing act that one must manage to sustain a paradox. She is not pleased there is time before he will return, less pleased that in all actuality he already has returned, and sore that an apology he hasn’t, isn’t and won’t apologize.

Her back is wet, she realizes belatedly. She’s not used to having a back, or having it be wet. Just like she’s not used to clothing -- she’s felt it, before, jackets on her console, shoes on her grates, ties on her floors, armfuls of clothing being lugged around in the wardrobe. But this is different, this is the hyperawareness that there is cloth on her, around her, netting hanging limp on her wrists, cool wind touching against her bare face and neckline and hands, and that her back is soaked through with morning dew and it is not very comfortable.

It’s burdensome, but as she gets to her feet -- wondering at the fact that she has feet, that she is in this form once more, wondering about what her thief must be worrying about -- she finds she likes the rustle of fabric at her knees, the swaying of the hem at her ankles. 

It’s strange, but she thinks she likes it. She stretches, rocking up onto the balls of her feet, stretching her hands toward the skies.

There are zeppelins in the skies.

Idris never liked zeppelins, or aeroplanes, or hang gliders either. Nothing ever feels as elegant as her and her sisters, but she supposes now that there’s only her, and she’s not herself, zeppelins aren’t all that bad.

They’re actually rather quite nice. With the downfall of Cybus Industries, there was an opening in the market. It was all rather fascinating, and at a different time, she and her thief will enjoy sitting and watching as the market flourished in three months and a week.

It will be a while, in their own personal timeline; her thief is under the impression this universe is not one they can easily enter nor exit, though Idris sees the smaller details of how she can be here. How and why are easy, but Idris is curious as to why _exactly_ she's here, in central London, in the imperfectly named Pete’s World, standing in a patch of grass, across the street from a Tesco, at twenty-three minutes (and approximately forty seconds) after five in the morning.

At twenty-four minutes after five in the morning, Idris sees Jackie Tyler walk out of the Tesco, and she knows.

Jackie Tyler is currently seven weeks pregnant, and Pete Tyler is following behind her, bag in hand. Jackie is tired, not having had been a fan of being pregnant the first time around, and not enjoying it any more this time. Idris doesn’t _know_ this universe, like she does her own, but she would guess that Jackie had started to have food cravings -- the Tesco bag is full of watermelon or cantaloupe or red grapes, but she doesn't know which.

She is idly curious, though.

So she follows them.

Halfway down the block, Pete stops, pats his pockets, and swears.

(Idris has grown fond of English -- spends enough time translating every language into it -- but she still finds their swearing inelegant. Internally, she translates it to Adarese and Dai Bendu and High Drellion and the sharp gestures of the Givilian Sign Language.)

Pete hands the bag to Jackie, then turns and walks back towards the Tesco, passing Idris, not seeing her, her perception filter still in place.

And, in another moment -- the entire universe singing its history and present and multitudes of futures to her -- Idris knows _exactly_.

She walks up to Jackie and asks, “Do you know what brontide is?”

Jackie startles. “You,” she says, looking at Idris and then frowning. “You’re that nutter from--” she starts, before abruptly realizing that Idris cannot be _that nutter from before_ because, to the best of her limited human knowledge, Idris could not have jumped between the universes. After a moment, and Idris hearing the echoes of a dozen different timelines with a dozen different answers, Jackie simply asks, “Isn’t that an author?”

“No,” Idris says. “Well, yes,” she corrects. In one thousand, three hundred and sixty-three years, Emile Brontide will publish _Sirimiri_ , but that’s not important, not right now. “Not right now,” she repeats.

“Sorry Jacks, I forgot my wallet, with my Tor--” Pete startles, as he had not previously noticed Idris. “My ID in it,” he finishes. “Jacks, do you know...?”

“I like her father better,” Idris says. It’s too early in their timeline for her to tell them, though. It will be another three weeks before their doctor tells them to expect a boy, and Jackie and Pete argue over what to name their son. She's for her old surname for her dad, he's for his grandfather's given name. Jackie will be afraid of losing Pete again, and she will eventually agree to Anthony, instead of naming him Prentice.

“Right,” Pete says, uncertainly, looking between her and Jackie. Jackie gives a slight shrug. “Well, we best be off then, shouldn’t we? Don’t want Rose to wake up and worry, right? Uh, it was nice meeting you.”

Idris just nods, as they walk away, Pete giving a few furtive looks over his shoulder. They turn the corner, and as her body starts dematerializing, she wonders where she will end up next.

\- -- -

From the very first time she arrived, there has been a hole between the two universes shaped just like her, and she is not surprised to end back up in Pete’s World, and she is mostly sure that doing so has not shot a hole through the fabric of space and time.

If space and time were a fabric, it would be woven very tightly, but even as tight as it would be woven, there would still be the smallest of spaces between strands, and after Idris has accomplished all that needs to accomplish, after she learns all she needs to accomplish, it will be easy enough for her to smooth the strands back into place.

It's funny how metaphorical strands of time make perfect sense, but the physical strands of this form's hair don't. She hasn't done much, but her hair is slowly coming undone from how it was done, frizzy whisps of hair falling into her face. It's tiresome, having to keep pushing them back, just as it's tiresome to actually _walk_ for prolonged periods of time.

It's been five minutes, now, and Idris is already tired of the slow path. She's at a park, now, and she looks towards the benches.

She is not surprised to see Jackie, with an eye on her son, and Idris appropriately adjusts her course to head towards her.

Jackie sees her, as she approaches, and stares at her for a long moment, before checking back on her son. After everything, Daleks and Cybermen and Davros and the Medusa Cascade, one strange woman who seems to be following her through time and space barely phases her.

Idris smiles, and her heart swells -- she wonders how her thief can survive with just two -- and there's a feeling with it, something big, bigger and more sad and even more happy than _alive_.

The reason time and space can be comparable to fabric is because the vast majority of fabric is not sentient; but the not-fabric of time and space is just the tiniest bit alive, and like cells multiply and grow to heal wounds, the metaphorical strands of time are starting to align themselves back as normal.

She cannot spend as much time here as she would like -- and oh she would like to grow to learn this new universe, to learn if Jackie has tired of cantaloupe after Tony's birth, to learn how her thief has restructured this version of Torchwood, to learn something other than the inevitability the universe is screaming in fear from -- but she has time enough to get across a warning that needs to be heeded.

“Do you remember that word I told you to look up?”

Jackie frowns, concentrating. “Bronte, wasn’t it?”

“Brontide,” Idris says. “And do you know what it means?”

Jackie shakes her head. "I can look it up on my phone, though, if that'd help," she says, hand going to her purse.

“It means very soon, he will stop apologizing.”

Jackie continues to frown.

“Sorry we’re late,” her and her thief and Donna’s Doctor says, as he arrives, fingers laced with Rose Tyler’s. “We got into a bit of a pickle trying to pick up broccoli. Oh, hello,” he adds, finally seeing past Idris' perception filter. "I'm the Doctor."

Rose not-too-discreetly coughs.

"Sorry, John Smith."

Idris feels that feeling again, seeing him, there, right in front of her. "Hello, Doctor," she says, looking up at him, though her vision blurs for a moment. "It's so very good to meet you."

Rose stares at Idris, with the slightest frown. “Wait a minute, I know you.”

Idris' heart swells, once more, far bigger than she thought possible. “I knew you would.”

“You’re...” Rose says, brows furrowing in concentration. “There’s no way you can be, but you're...”

The Doctor recognizes her, then. She can tell the exact moment when it clicks for him, the exact moment when his expression floods with the same emotion, and for a moment he has his old, before it's shuttered, and he asks, tight, "How long can you be here?"

"Not long."

The fabric is closing, around her, and possibly because of her. She can't stay long enough to prevent the damage he will cause, though she fears it's damage he will cause because of the damage she now may be causing.

"Why did you come here?" he asks. And she can see it, now, the ecstasy has faded and his expression is stormy.

Idris came because she knew she was needed. Because sometimes self-fulfilling prophecies cannot be avoided. Because she knows far more than he can possibly imagine, with his naive belief that a flesh body can't hold the Matrix and live. But this is one of the many times when the Doctor needs to learn things the slow way. "Because I wanted one of Jackie's cuppas." 

The Doctor makes a face. "Really."

"Oi," Jackie says, annoyed, behind them.

Idris leans in. "We've travelled farther for less."

His face splits into a grin. "Oh yes," he says, doubtlessly remembering fresh brewed Givilian solstice tea.

Her time here is ending. She knows her futures and her pasts and her present, but there are certain aspects that are even unbeknownst to her, and whether she will see this version of her Doctor is one.

She is glad, that if this is the last time she will see them, that she will leave with the memory of her Doctor's smile.

Her breath starts coming out as soft whirrs. 

Allons-y.


End file.
